Human body communication refers to a technology of transmitting signals between electronic devices coupled to a human body having conductivity using the human body as a communication channel. This is a technology where a network is configured so that communications between various portable devices such as a personal digital assistant (PDA), a portable personal computer, a digital camera, an MP3 player and a mobile phone, and communications with fixed devices such as a printer, TV and an entrance control system can be made through simple contact with users. The present invention is related to a method and an apparatus capable of enhancing data reception efficiency and reducing an error rate of receiver signals using multiple receivers in the communication of the devices.
For the human body communication, the interference of signals between users is formed under a condition in which a large number of users are present, and also the interference is formed by signals generated from different electronic devices.
Also, an error rate of receiver signals may be increasingly formed since the use of the human body communication system may adversely affect the flow of signals transmitted by transmission means and the stability and correctness of the receiver signals according to a direction of a signal electrode of a receiver terminal to be degraded.
In connection with the above context, as a technology using multiple receivers for the conventional human body communications, there has been proposed a method including: selecting the optimum pair of receiver electrodes among multiple receiver electrodes that are attached to different spots of the human body and performing image processing on a corresponding value of the optimum pair of the receiver electrodes. However, the method has an advantage to increase a receiver sensitivity in the case of the method of selecting only one pair of receiver electrodes with the highest voltage difference from the multiple receiver electrodes, but it has a problem that it is difficult to deduce the receiver signal from a large number of the receiver signals obtained from the multiple receiver electrodes since only the signals obtained from one pair of the receiver electrodes are selected and used for the image processing.
Therefore, there has been an increasing need for a receiver in the human body communication system capable of reducing an error rate of the receiver signals by decreasing the interference in the human body communications, the interference being generated by a large number of users and electronic devices.